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The “Good Old Days”

This morning when I opened my email, I was greeted with yet another Right-Wing chain letter. This one cried the usual river of complaints against government interference with business. Naturally, all this alleged government interference began with the Obama Administration.

According to this letter, the entire reason for the lack of jobs in the economy is the backbreaking burden of government regulations, telling businesses who they can hire, what hours they can require workers to work, and what they can be paid All government does in return is tax these poor beleaguered businesses.

First, let’s talk about these unfair regulations and burdensome labor laws. Evidently those on the Right need to be reminded about how “Business” operated in the days before government regulation.

Here are a few scenes from our History, in the days before the government stepped in and told business “who they can hire, how many hours they can work and what they have to pay”

It’s true that many of our jobs have been lost when “Business” outsourced these jobs overseas. Why did they do it? Because they are free to operate without government regulation, and their costs for labor are lower.

What do they get for their money? Sweatshops, child labor, unsafe factories, and poverty level payrolls. Exactly the way they’d like to be able to operate here.

“The Good Old Days”, indeed.

Now let’s take a look at this awful tax burden they are complaining about.

Corporations have been successful at returning to a profitable mode of operation, and the stock market has indeed recovered from the economic disaster that occurred near the end of the eight year Bush Administration. During that administration, a tax restructuring gave the wealthiest businesses and individuals in America the biggest tax break in history. This tax break remains in effect to this day, and yet business wants more.

They argue that they pay an unfair amount of the tax burden, and that this burden should be shifted to the shoulders of the Middle Class Wage Earner. They further argue that the money collected in taxes is wasted and frittered away by the government.
Perhaps so.

After all, business gets nothing for their money, do they?

So, lets all jump on the Tea Party bandwagon, and get government out of the way, so Business can return to the Good Old Days, and we can all have sweatshop jobs with no minimum wage, no collective bargaining and no Social Safety Net, and get rid of all these useless government programs! (he sneered, his jaws dripping with sarcasm…)